I had been not-looking at him deliberately since the alley. Cataloguing without committing. Letting him exist in my peripheral vision because full attention had felt like too much on top of everything else, like one more thing I didn't have the bandwidth for. I had noted the jaw and the shoulders and the quality of his stillness and filed it all underirrelevant, not the point, focus on your extremely consequential life decisions.
In the water, with the hat gone and the sunglasses gone and nothing between his face and the March afternoon, I ran out of ways to not look.
He was?—
The word that arrived first wasmuch. As in, too much for the space available, too much for the context, too much for a woman who was supposed to be married right now and was instead treading water off a rebuilt pier in her underwear.
He had a face that had been through things. Not broken—nothing so dramatic—just lived in, in the way of men who'd spent time in difficulty, in the kind of conditions that stripped everything nonessential and left only what had been there all along. A jaw that could have anchored something. Eyes, dark and direct, with the sunglasses gone, finally looking at me without any glass between us.
He was looking at me like I was something worth looking at.
My stomach did a thing that I elected not to examine.
"You're insane," he said. He didn't sound displeased.
"I know." I pushed the hair out of my face. "I feel incredible."
The laugh that came out of him was real and full and short, surprised out of him the same way the smile kept being surprised out of him, like his face had to catch him off guard to do it. "You feel incredible."
"Don't act like that's unreasonable. I just jumped off a pier."
"In March."
"In March," I agreed. "Off a pier. In my—" I glanced down at the water. "In considerably less than I started the day in."
The current was easy here—no pull, just the gentle Atlantic persuasion, and I was a decent swimmer. Donovan family summers at Isle of Palms had seen to that. I treaded water without effort, and the cold had already shifted from assault to something more like clarity, the kind that came with full-body exposure to something honest.
He was staying close without crowding me. I noticed that. The same instinct that had kept a respectful foot of rail between us on the pier was operating here in the water—close enough to matter, far enough for it to have been a choice.
I thought about Daniel, who would have told me the water was too cold and offered to rent a paddleboat instead.
I thought about Daniel and I felt?—
Guilt, yes. The guilt was there, a real and present thing, and I wasn't going to pretend otherwise. Not guilt that I had left, but guilt that I had let it go so far before leaving. Guilt for the dress and the flowers and the photographer and my father's jaw doing that thing with the expense. Guilt for Daniel's face at the end of the aisle, open and undefended, with no reason to prepare for what was coming.
But underneath the guilt—and this was the thing I couldn't quite get my hands around—was something else. Something that had been very small and very quiet for so long that I hadn't known it was still alive. Now, it had air and was expanding into every available space, and it felt like?—
It felt like the first day of something.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
“Sure.”
"Do you feel like a completely different person when you travel somewhere new? Like the city you're in doesn't know who you are, so you get to decide?"
He considered this seriously. He did that—considered things seriously. "Sometimes," he said. "Depends where."
"I've never done it." I turned onto my back and floated for a moment, the sky above me a pale and noncommittal March blue. "I've never been anywhere nobody knew me. Every room I've ever walked into in this city, there's been context. Donovan's youngest. Patricia and Martin's girl. Providence Academy's Mary Catherine." I let the water hold me. "I've thought about just—going. Starting from nothing somewhere else. New York. Miami. Somewhere big enough to disappear into."
"Alone?" His voice had shifted. Not dramatically. But something had come into it.
"Maybe." I let the word float. "Why not? Get on a highway, see where it goes. No phone, no baggage—well, I don't have those anyway at the moment, so I'm halfway there."
"Mary Catherine."
Something about the way he said my name. All four syllables, deliberate, like he was making sure I could hear the weight behind them. I righted myself in the water and found him closer than he'd been, treading easy, his eyes on me with an expression that was not quite a frown but was in that neighborhood.
"No," he said.
